‘Passive Revolution’ on the World Stage: How the Global Movement to Stop Climate Change Failed to Produce an Alternative Future

Beginning in the late 1960s, a new global movement pushing for more radical solutions to “global environmental problems” such as climate change unexpectedly burst onto the world stage. To the surprise of many, members of subaltern groups worldwide began converging and gaining more and more adherents behind their goal of radically reforming or transcending capitalism to stop or limit climate change—and it seemed for a time that they might yet succeed. And yet, today, nearly half a century since it first emerged, this global movement has all but failed to achieve its objectives: the world’s governments have managed to pass only weak and ineffective international agreements and measures to address the climate crisis and the international community is now beginning to experience the impacts of catastrophic climate change. Why? How was this once promising and powerful global movement contained?

Drawing from interviews, participant observation, and historical sources, this paper analyzes the emergence and evolution of radical climate groups in the Philippines to argue that the radical global movement to stop climate change was defeated as a result of a “passive revolution” on the world stage: Faced with a growing challege to their hegemony, a particular fraction of the world’s dominant classes came together and pushed for limited international reforms to address the crisis, thereby disorganizing the dominated classes and consequently weakening not just the dominated classes’ but also even their own capacity to counter the more conservative elites blocking their proposed reforms. Building on Gramsci’s concept of “passive revolution” and examining how it works at the global level, the paper presents an alternative framework for understanding transnational politics and, in so doing, examines how social movements can succeed in producing alternative futures.